Cons:

Wanted: Weapons of Fate is a contradictory game. On one hand, it accurately captures the brain-dead dialogue and over-the-top violence of the 2008 action flick. On the other, it takes a movie filled with exciting action sequences and distills it all into a rather dull experience. There's some competent shooting action, and one real firecracker of a stage, but generally it comes up short. Is it possible to boil down cinematic ultraviolence into a pulpy series of tedious button mashes? Wanted proves that it is.

Weapons of Fate kicks off the action immediately following the events of the film. As Wesley Gibson, you've gone from downtrodden desk jockey to world-class assassin. The film's events lead you straight into the crosshairs of The Fraternity, an ancient organization of clandestine killers. Wesley's been marked for death by the Paris branch, and as Weapons of Fate progresses, you'll find out why. The game's chapters jump back and forth between the present and several decades before. You'll play as Wesley in the present and his father twenty-five years prior. Over the course of hte game's six hours you come to see the past and present weave together.

As I shot my way through Weapons of Fate I constantly thought of Dark Sector. Just as in that third-person shooter, Weapons of Fate juxtaposes gunplay with specialized deadly projectiles. In the case of Dark Sector, it was a glaive. In Weapons of Fate it's the film's trademark curved bullets, which are great for bringing enemies out of cover. Also like Dark Sector, Weapons of Fate never quite hits its potential. It's a competent shooter but is highly monotonous in its approach. You'll encounter wave upon wave of the same enemy types -- guys with machine guns, goons with shotguns, and blade-toting grunts who initiate button-tapping mini-events -- with minimal changes until the last section of the game. In contrast to the movie's hyper-kinetic approach to action, Weapons of Fate offers only repetitive combat, even if the gunplay is serviceable.

Weapons of Fate has plenty of sound gameplay concepts, but many unfortunately never jell. For example, the blind-fire system allows you to distract enemies so that you can quickly leap between cover points to flank them. Unfortunately, the cover system doesn't always work, so sometimes you'll be left standing right in front of enemy fire. There are other features that are negligibly useful, such as Assassin Time, which lets you slow down time to land accurate shots. It's invaluable for many boss fights, but it's largely unnecessary for most of the Fraternity grunts, whom you can dispatch with well-timed headshots or curved bullets. Weapons of Fate tries to diversify combat by throwing in some turret and sniping segments but they're possibly the worst sections of the game, especially the annoying mounted-gun sequences.